What we learn through the years

I wrote the entry about Alan Arkin (see below) on the 5th of January, and because I tend to save drafts and ignore them for a while, this fell off the radar until today, when I learned from my mother that Auntie Jerry passed away on January 16th, Wednesday. It seemed apt to pick up where I'd left off and write about another person who, though old, was never less interesting or less loved for it.

Auntie Jerry was 85 when she died, and she and my mother have been friends for over 30 years. They met when my father was sent to work in San Jose some time in the early 70s. My mom couldn't work since she was on a spousal visa, so she signed up for a three-day makeup seminar at the San Francisco airport. On the third day, an older lady sat down beside her for lunch and they began a conversation that would last for the next 36 years. They corresponded through letters and later, email. Auntie Jerry watched me and my brother grow up through the photos my mother sent her, and she and her son, Uncle Larry, also made a visit to Singapore when I was a babe in arms, and my brother five years old. Later, we got to meet in California when my brother and I had our first trip to the US. It was 1985. Uncle Larry gave me a beautiful book about unicorns, and Auntie Jerry sat beside me as we took plenty of photographs. I remember her plump warm arms and the easy sweet smiles you find only on the faces of grandmothers.

When I was 16, my parents and I visited her at her home in Reno, Nevada, and we drove together to Lake Tahoe. It was winter but the snow couldn't hide the tall green pines. That was the last time we were together. During my college years, I rang her on a couple of occasions. Now I wish that I had called her more often and visited again. Every year, she remembered all our birthdays and sent my brother and me cards. As children, we loved the Halloween cards my brother got on his birthday (back then, we never found Halloween-themed items in Singapore) and I whooped with glee every time a package came for me. It only happened a couple of times, but the two packages held small unicorn figurines. Auntie Jerry wasn't rich but she knew how to make a child feel very special.

Bright, alert, fiercely independent (she drove herself on road trips when she was well into her 70s) even to her last days, Auntie Jerry didn't want a funeral or flowers, but asked that people donate to charities of their choice. She died of cardiac arrest in hospital, where she was recovering from vein-replacement surgery in her left leg. I'd like to believe she didn't suffer when she died and that she wasn't afraid of death. She was a grand lady, our old friend, our long-distance grandmother who never forgot us despite the 8000 miles between our homes.

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Saved on the 5th of January, 2007

I read a lot of articles about movies and film stars. They usually bring me entertainment news; few ever give me pause or make me think about my own life or the lives of people I know. This article from Esquire did just that.

WHAT I'VE LEARNED: Alan Arkin

Actor, 72, Santa Fe

Interviewed by Mike Sager

Things are never going to turn out the way you think they will.

Improvisation has been crucial to my whole life; it's what we're doing all the time.

What I've learned about teaching is to refer back to the root of that word, which is educo, which means "to pull from." Education does not mean jamming information into somebody's head. Rather, it's that ancient idea that all knowledge is within us; to teach is to help somebody pull it out of themselves.

During the McCarthy era, there was a huge dichotomy in the country. Elvis was the big thing. It was just kind of mindless euphoria on the one hand, and on the other hand, people were living in fear for their lives—in fear of total annihilation. It was very schizophrenic.

Today there's still a great element of fear, but I don't think anybody's having a very good time.

I'm not a political analyst, but what I see is a sort of worldwide paranoia. Everybody knows: The. Jig. Is. Up. Nature is pissed off and everybody's waiting with baited breath for the other shoe to drop. Everybody knows it. Nobody's free from that fear.

No matter what you do or where you are, you're going to be missing out on something.

Hollywood is a strange place. The class structure here is more rigid than almost any place I've ever experienced. It's made more difficult by the fact that it's constantly changing. You never know what class you belong to unless you're one of the two or three people that have been in the same echelon for a long, long time.

If you're looking outside yourself for substantiation of your own happiness, you're going to fail.

Marriage requires searing honesty at all costs. I learned that from my third wife.

Children learn from what you are rather than what you tell them. What you try to jam into their heads isn't going to be worth beans if the way you're living your life doesn't look like that.

I used to have a lot of philosophies of acting; they all fell apart over the years.

Anything you're rigid about, sooner or later, the rug is going to get pulled out from under you.

We don't have a lot of rules in our house, but I do have one: I'm good for one minute of hair talk. When she asks me, "How does my hair look?" the timer goes on.

Actors are not as interesting as I used to think they were.

There have been times I wished that I had goals that didn't require other people giving me stuff.

I don't know if acting was a calling for me. I feel like it came out of a lot of emotional needs—the same old actor bullshit: I need attention. I need love. Blah, blah, blah. And the truth is, being an actor doesn't help with that at all. The approval's not really the kind of approval you need, anyway. What someone like that needs is one-on-one, personal caring. The anonymity of show-business caring doesn't help. Like my manager tells me all the time: "They love you." Finally I said, "I don't want to hear that word anymore. They don't love me. Maybe they like my work a little bit. But they don't love me. They don't even know me. If they never saw me again, it wouldn't make any difference. If we were both drowning, they would shove me under to get on the raft."

It took a long conversation to convince the people that I was right for Little Miss Sunshine. They were thinking of somebody, I think, about ten or fifteen years older than I was. They thought I was a little virile. Well, virile was the word they used.

I read somewhere that some people believe that the entire universe is a matrix of living thought. And I said, "Man, if that's not a definition of God, I don't know what is."

Truth is always unfolding. It's not an absolute.

Medicine? Oh, Jesus. Can we not talk about that?

As you get older, you have to change your view of what your life is. Your physiology is going to demand certain things of you, and you either have to pay attention to it or die. I'm on regimens now—there are things I have to do. If you surrender to it, there's a certain peace you can achieve, rather than saying, "I gotta be the way I was."

I recite the Robert Browning poem to myself all the time. You know the quote? "Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be, / The last of life, for which the first was made." I'm praying it's going to be true.

Posted by Monoceros at January 30, 2007 11:23 AM